After the Absolute

the Dialogical Future of Religious Reflection

Leonard Swidler

Fortress Press

Minneapolis

Hypertext version copyright © 2001 by Ingrid Shafer. Reproduction, publication, and distribution limited to purposes of study, teaching, and academic research.

Conditions: Copyright in the underlying marked up html files which implement the hypertext features of this World Wide Web site is held by Ingrid Shafer. Distribution of this version on the Internet, does not constitute consent to any use of the underlying hypertext markup for commercial redistribution either via the Internet or using some other form of hypertext distribution.

Fortress Augsburg

1990

TO

GERARD S. SLOYAN, OFTEN MY PARTNER IN DIALOGUE

ON THE OCCASION OF HIS 70TH BIRTHDAY

AD MULTOS ANNOS!

CONTENTS

PREFACE  i

INTRODUCTION  1

  I. BASES OF DIALOGUE  4

 1. DEFINITION OF DIALOGUE  5

 2. MUTUALITY, RELATIONALITY AND DIALOGUE  6

a. Metaphysics: From Statics to Dynamics  7

b. Epistemology: Deabsolutizing Truth  7

c. Psychology: Developmental and Relational  13

d. Ethics: A Focus on Mutuality, Relationality and Dialogue  17

e. Summary  18

 II. THE “INNER” DIALOGUE  19

 3. INTRA-INSTITUTIONAL DIALOGUE: ROMAN CATHOLICISM  20

a. General Reflections  20

b. Vatican Understanding of Dialogue  21

c. Recommendations for Dialogue  22

 4. INTRA-RELIGIOUS DIALOGUE: CHRISTIANITY  23

a. Divisions in Christianity  23

b. Toward Christian Unity  24

c. Roman Catholic Ecumenism  25

III. THE “INTER” DIALOGUE  29

 5. GENERAL REFLECTIONS  30

a. Ground Rules for Interreligious, Interideological Dialogue  30

b. Dialogue in Practice  34

c. Depth or “Spiritual” Dialogue  38

d. A Universal Systematic Reflection (Theology) of Religion-Ideology  39

e. “Ecumenical Esperanto”  41

f. Purposes and Problems of Interreligious,  Interideological Dialogue  46

g. Full Human Life  52

 6. CHRISTOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE TO DIALOGUE  55

a. Christianity’s Jewish Roots: Jesus (Yeshua) the Jew?  65

b. Christianity’s Jewish Roots: The Jewish Christian Church?  61

c. Yeshua: Messiah or Christ?  63

d. Yeshua and His Disciples Thought Jewishly  66

e. Development of Christology  69

f. The Yeshua of History  71

g. The Teaching Yeshua, Not the Taught Christ  74

h. Yeshua: Human and Divine?   77

i. Pre-existent Christ?  81

j. Logos Theology  82

k. Dialogue Suggest a Solution   84

l. “Ontologization” in Religions  85

 7. JEWISH-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE  87

a. Antisemitism and Jewish-Christian Dialogue  87

b. The Message of the Jewish “No” to Christianity   90

c. Why Should Jews Dialogue with Christians?  91

 8. JEWISH-CHRISTIAN-MUSLIM TRIALOGUE

  93

a. Praxis  95

b. Expectations from the Trialogue  95

c. Muslim Critical Thinkers  96

 9. HINDU-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE  99

a. Potential Dialogue Partners  99

b. Openness to Dialogue?  100

c. Hindu and Christian Understandings of  Ultimate Reality   100

d. Distortions: Pantheism and Illusion  103

10. BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE  105

a. Buddhist and Christian Parallels   105

b. Return to Sources  106

c. Teachings of Gautama, Yeshua and the Rabbis  107

d. God and “Sunyata”  111

e. Conclusion  114

11. CONFUCIAN-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE  115

a. Chinese Religions  115

b. Is Confucianism a Religion?  116

c. God and the Transcendent  117

d. Confucian and Christian Humanism   118

e. Confucian and Christian Notions of “Salvation”  119

f. Subordinationism and Egalitarianism  120

g. Self-love: The Foundation of Society  121

h. Future of the Dialogue  123

12. SUMMARY OF DIALOGUE WITH RELIGIONS  123

13. DIALOGUE WITH IDEOLOGIES: MARXISM   124

a. A Survey History of the Dialogue  124

b. Attitudes Toward Dialogue  131

c. Capitalism vs. Socialism    133

d. Marxist Self-Criticism  136

e. Questions About the Fundamental Meaning of Human Life  138

f. Conclusion  143

IV. DIALOGUE ATTEMPTED  144

14. A CHRISTIAN EXPERIMENT IN “ECUMENICAL ESPERANTO” 145

a. The “I” and Radical Openness  145

b. Stages of Faith Development and Interreligious, Interideological Dialogue 146

c. “Reconciling the World to God through Christ”  150

d. An Open Christology or a “Realitology”?  156

V. CONCLUSION  161

NOTES   162

PREFACE

Dialogue, especially dialogue in the religious-and ideological-area is not not simply a series of conversations. It is a whole new way of thinking, a way of seeing and reflecting on the world and its meaning.

If I were writing just for Christians I would use the term theology to name what I am largely talking about here. But the dialogical way of thinking is not something that is peculiarly Christian, though Christians for a variety of historical reasons are today at the forefront in employing it and promoting its use. Dialogue, however, is a way for all human beings to reflect on the ultimate meaning of life. So, regardless whether one is a theist or not, whether one is given to using Hellenistic thought categories as Christians have been wont to do in their “theologizing” or not, dialogue is ever more clearly the way of the future in religious-and ideological-reflection on the ultimate meaning of life, and how to live accordingly.

In this volume I try to think beyond the absolutes we Christians-and other in their own ways-have increasingly found deabsolutized in our modern thought world. I try to reflect on the ways all of us humans need to think about the world and its meaning now that more and more of us, both individually and even at times institutionally, are gaining enough maturity to notice that there are entire other ways of integrating an understanding of the world than the way we and our forebears grew up in.

In this new situation I sense the need for consciously developing a common language we can use effectively to communicate with each other so we can learn about these other ways of seeing the world, both to appreciate our neighbors and to enrich ourselves. I call this common language Ecumenical Esperanto, because it should serve as a common language without replacing any of the living languages, that is, the languages of our religious and ideological traditions.

Of course, such thinking anew about the world and its meaning must necessarily mean thinking anew about all of our religious beliefs, and for me as a Christian this preeminently includes my central teaching, the meaning of Jesus the Christ, Christology. Hence, I here attempt to begin thinking through again the meaning of Christology-but this time, in dialogue.

My dialogue partners in this new paradigm of understanding the world, of thinking, are all the world’s ways of understanding the world and its meaning, the world’s religions and ideologies. And so, I here attempt to engage in dialogue with at least the world’s major religions and ideologies, reflecting on what we-in this case, Christian and non-Christian-can learn about and from each other. But beyond all these dialogue partners is the often unconscious but always pervasive dialogue partner, for me and an ever increasing number of contemporaries, of modern critical thought.

Precisely those of us who are open to dialogue, that is, those of us who are open to going beyond our prior absolutes to learning from each other, live in a deabsolutized, a relationized, a modern critical-thinking, thought world, a thought world wherein we no longer can live on the level of the first naivete, but are at least striving to live on the level of the second naivete. On this level we see our root symbols and metaphors as symbols and metaphors, and hence do not mistake them for empirical, ontological realities, but also do not simply reject them as fantasies and fairy tales. Rather, because we see them as root symbols and metaphors, we correctly appreciate them as indispensable vehicles to communicate profound realities that go beyond the capacity of our everyday language to communicate.

Here again it is becoming that in the attempt to communicate and receive the understandings and insights gained in reflecting dialogically on our root metaphors, we need a common language-one of course that never will be adequate, that will always be growing, one that will never replace the “primary” living languages of our root metaphors growing out of our origins and traditions, but one that nevertheless will become increasingly indispensable in the future: Ecumenical Esperanto. It is in that language that I attempt at the end of this volume to do an exegesis of a key Christian scripture-dialogically after the absolute.

INTRODUCTION

Beyond the absolute way of understanding the world and its meaning for us, beyond the absolute way of thinking, we have begun to find a much richer, “truer,” way of understanding the world-the dialogical way of thinking. It is this dialogical way of thinking particularly in the area of religion and ideology that I intend to reflect on here.

Thomas Kuhn revolutionized our understanding of the development of scientific thinking with his notion of paradigm shifts. He painstakingly showed that fundamental “paradigms” or “exemplary models” are the large thought frames within which we place and interpret all observed data and that scientific advancement inevitably brings about eventual paradigm shifts-from geocentricism to heliocentrism, for example, or from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics-which are always vigorously resisted at first, as was the thought of Galileo, but finally prevail.¹ This insight, however, is valid not only for the development of thought in the natural sciences, but also applicable to all major disciplines of human thought, including the systematic religious and ideological reflection which Christians call “theology.”

A major paradigm shift in systematic religious and ideological reflection, i.e., in “theology,” then, means a major change “in the very idea of what it is to do theology.”² For example, the major Christian theological revolution that occurred at the first ecumenical council (Nicaea, 325 A.D.) did not so much resolve the battle over whether the Son and Father were of “the same substance,” homoousion, important as that was, but rather that, “by defining ‘homoousion,’ tacitly admitted that here were issues in theology which could not be solved simply on the basis of recourse to the language of the Scriptures.”³ In the next several subsequent centuries a flood of new answers poured forth to questions being posed in categories unused by Jesus and his first-Jewish-followers-in this case, in Greek philosophical categories of thought.

As the paradigm within which the data of what Jesus taught and did and how his Jewish followers responded was perceived and understood shifted from the Semitic, concrete biblical thought world to a Hellenistic, largely abstract philosophical one, the questions asked, and the terms in which they were asked, shifted accordingly, and of course so did the answers. As always, when a new major paradigm shift occurs, old answers are no longer helpful, for they respond to questions no longer posed, in thought categories no longer used, within a framework which no longer prevails. It is not that the old answers are now declared wrong; it is simply that they no longer apply. Aristotle’s answers in physics and chemistry in terms of the four elements of air, fire, water and earth, for example, simply do not speak to the questions posed by modern chemists and physicists. Tenth-century Christian theologians answering that Mary remained a virgin while giving birth to Jesus (i.e., her hymen was not broken) were answering a question that no modern critical- thinking Christian theologian would pose, for it presupposed a thought-world which placed a high value on unbroken hymens. That thought world is gone. Hence, the old answer is im-pertinent.

Today we are in the midst of another fundamental paradigm shift in our approach in what it means to do “theology.”  This book will try to spell out some of the dimensions of this shift, but will focus mainly on one of the major aspects: the turn to dialogue. The old paradigms of doing theology in splendid isolation, of hostile polemic, or the allegedly loving proselytizing of religious or ideological “outsiders” is more and more being found wanting. Instead, dialogue within and without is seen as the way forward beyond religious and ideological isolation, polemic and enmity-breeding proselytization. I want to argue in these reflec­tions, then, that, as part of this shift, dialogue, and very especially interreligious and interideological dialogue, is the most appropriate matrix within which to carry out systematic reflection on the “explana­tions of the meaning of life and how to live accordingly,” which Christians call theology.

First a word about terminology: In the past most “explanations of the meaning of life and how to live accordingly” have entailed a belief in that which goes beyond, which “transcends,” humanity and the world, traditionally termed the divine or the transcendent-Theravada Buddhism is a clear exception-and in recent centuries they have been called religions in the West. Those most recent “explanations of the meaning of life and how to live accordingly” which do not include a belief in the transcendent, such as Marxism, have at times been called ideologies, as in the World Council of Churches’ “Dialogues with Peoples of Living Faiths and Ideologies.”  I am here adopting that terminology.

The reasons why in this controverted area of the definition, or rather, accurate description, of religion I have been led in this direction are the following:

The generic term is “worldview and way,” of which there are two main species: religion and ideology. A “worldview and way” is an “explanation of the meaning of life and how to live accordingly.”  It will always include the “four c’s”: creed (belief-system), code (ethical-system), cult (celebratory-system), and community-structure (social system). If the “explanation of the meaning of life and how to live accordingly” is based ultimately on something which “goes beyond,” “transcends,” humanity and the world, anthropon kai kosmon, it belongs to the species “religion”; if it does not, but is ultimately “innerworldly” in its explanation, it belongs to the species “ideology.”

There is of course something problematic with the term ideology-and also its possible alternatives. “Ideology,” despite the fact that it etymologically means something like the systematic study of an idea (as biology is the systematic study of living things), often is understood to have a pejorative denotation. Thus used, an ideology would be a system of thought which like a Procrustian bed forces all data within its structures, even if it means distorting them grossly. However, ideology is also understood in a neutral fashion, meaning simply a systematized body of thought, as for example in a reference to Marxist ideology, which also includes a code for behavior flowing from the theoretical analysis.

“Philosophy” is a possible alternative here to the term ideology in a neutral sense. But it has the disadvantage of including Christian philosophy, Hindu philosophy and other “religious” philosophies. Hence, it could lead to confusion if it were used without a modifying adjective to refer solely to a system of thought and action which does not include the notion of the transcendent. The difficulty with using the term “worldview” (Weltanschauung) alone instead of “ideology” is that it usually does not denote a spelled-out thought structure, which the term “ideology” does, but rather suggests a general, somewhat vague attitude toward life-and that surely does not describe Marxism, for example. Hence, the neutral, more nearly root etymological, understanding of “ideology” seems to be the least problematic term to use to describe an “explanation of the meaning of life and how to live accordingly” which does not include the element of the transcendent. Moreover, it is a self-description also used by at least some Marxists, and it also has the additional practical advantage of having been part of the official terminology used by the World Council of Churches. Consequently, its usage in this manner will probably gain in consensus and thus further create clarity in communication.

Another key term in these reflections that will need to be clarified is “dialogue.”  It has of late become the “in” thing and consequently the term has come to be used in a number of conflicting ways. After a description of what is meant by dialogue, I will sketch briefly the recent process of deabsolutizing our understanding of reality and of truth and how this has led to the possibility, and even necessity, of dialogue. Then the several “circles” of dialogue will be looked at, starting with the innermost, dialogue within an individual institution, with Roman Catholicism as the example. The next concentric circle is that of the individual religion or ideology, with Christianity as the example because the dialogue there is the furthest advanced. But the fullest demands upon and the greatest benefits from dialogue are seen in the next circle, interreligious, interideological dialogue. This will be the heart of the book: an attempt to show the way forward, not in “practical” and “spiritual” areas, each of which warrants separate full treatment, but in the “cognitive” area. One central thesis will be that a common language, an “ecumenical Esperanto,” must be developed to supplement, though not supplant, the various religious and ideological languages. Some major interreligious/ interideological dialogues will then be looked at briefly to ask what might be hoped for from them. Finally, a Christian experiment in “ecumenical Esperanto” will be essayed.

I. BASES OF DIALOGUE

1. DEFINITION OF DIALOGUE

Dialogue is conversation between two or more persons with differing views, the primary purpose of which is for each participant to learn from the other so that he or she can change and grow-of course, in addition both partners will also want to share their understanding with their partners. Minimally, the very fact that I learn that my dialogue partner believes “this” rather than “that” changes my attitude toward her; and a change in my attitude is a significant change, and growth, in me. We enter into dialogue, therefore, primarily so that we can learn, change and grow, not so that we can force change on the other.

In the past, when we encountered those who differed with us in the religious and ideological sphere, we did so usually either to defeat them as oppo­nents, or to learn about them so as to deal with them more effectively. In other words, we usually faced those who differed with us in a confrontation-sometimes more openly polemically, sometimes more subtly so, but usually with the ultimate goal of overcoming the other because we were convinced that we alone had the truth.

But that is not what dialogue is. Dialogue is not debate. In dialogue each partner must listen to the other as openly and sympathet­ically as possible in an attempt to understand the other’s position as precisely and, as it were, as much from within, as possible. Such an attitude automatically assumes that at any point we might find the part­ner’s position so persuasive that, if we were to act with integrity, we ourselves would have to change. That means that there is a risk involved in dialogue, that old positions and traditions may be found wanting. But, as the Hindu scholar R. Sandara Rajan remarks, “If it is impossible to lose one’s faith as a result of an encounter with another  faith, then I feel that the dialogue has been made safe from all possible risks,” to which the Anglican Christian scholar Leslie Newbigin adds, “a dialogue which is safe from all possible risks is no true dialogue.”¹ Even the Vatican has an incredibly strong statement supporting that position: “Doctrinal discussion requires perceptiveness, both in honestly setting out one’s own opinion and in recognizing the truth everywhere, even if the truth demolishes one so that one is forced to reconsider one’s own position, in theory and in practice, at least in part.”²

Until quite recently in almost all religious traditions, and certainly very definitely within Christianity, the idea of seeking reli­gious or ideological wisdom, insight or truth through dialogue, other than in a very initial and rudimentary fashion, occurred to very few people, and certainly had no influence in the major religious or ideolo­gical communities. The further idea of pursuing religious or ideological truth through dialogue with other religions and ideologies was even less thinkable. Merely a century and a half ago Pope Gregory XVI wrote: “We come now to a source which is, alas! all too productive of the deplorable evils afflicting the Church today. We have in mind indifferentism, that is, the fatal opinion everywhere spread abroad by the deceit of wicked men, that the eternal salvation of the soul can be won by the profession of any faith at all, provided that conduct conforms to the norms of justice and probity.... From this poisonous spring of indifferentism flows the false and absurd, or rather the mad principle [deliramentum] that we must secure and guarantee to each one liberty of conscience.”³

Today the situation is dramatically reversed. In 1964 Pope Paul VI’s first encyclical focused on dialogue: “dialogue is demanded nowa­days.... is demanded by the dynamic course of action which is changing the face of modern society. It is demanded by the pluralism of society and by the maturity man has reached in this day and age. Be he reli­gious or not, his secular education has enabled him to think and speak, and to conduct dialogue with dignity.”⁴ Further official words of encouragement came from the Vatican secretariat for dialogue with atheists: “All Christians should do their best to promote dialogue...as a duty of fraternal charity suited to our progressive and adult age.”⁵ Moreover, this secretariat spoke not solely of “practical” mat­ters, but recommended a focus on theology and doctrine without hesita­tion or trepidation: “Doctrinal dialogue should be initiated with courage and sincerity, with the greatest of freedom and with reverence. It focuses on doctrinal questions which are of concern to the parties in dialogue. They have different opinions but by common effort they strive  to improve mutual understanding, to clarify matters on which they agree, and if possible to enlarge the areas of agreement. In this way the parties to dialogue can enrich each other.”⁶

2. MUTUALITY, RELATIONALITY AND DIALOGUE

Why this dramatic change? Why should we pursue the truth in the area of religion and ideology by way of dialogue? There are many “external” factors that have appeared in the past century and a half which have contributed constitutively to the creation of what we today call the “global village.” In the past the vast majority of people were born, lived and died all within the village or valley of their origin. Now, however, in many countries hundreds of millions of people have left their homes not only once or a few times, but do so frequently-consequently experiencing customs and cultures other than their own. Even when we are in our homes, the world comes to us. It is difficult for a reading people to imagine what a dramatic change it was from the past to have the constant flood of information about others throughout the world in the form of newspapers, books, magazines, and even for the illiterate in the form of the radio and television. Until this century, for the masses of people other cultures and religions could not even be imagined, or perhaps even worse, they were imagined; today they come into “Everyman’s” living room on the TV.

In the past, economic self-sufficiency was often a reality for nations and cultures, and even well into this century it was a desideratum for some nations (e.g., Nazi Germany), but today economic inter-dependence is for most an accepted assumption. For the first time in human history even our wars have become global, and even the “small” ones threaten to become global. This fact has led to the establishment of a global politics never before seen-frustrating and unsatisfactory as it may be: the League of Nations after World War I and the United Nations after World War II. Now even the space around our Earth is slowly becoming “global” through cooperation and joint space ventures.

All these “externals have made it increasingly impossible for Westerners, and then gradually everyone, to live in isolation. We meed “the other” willy nilly, and after two catastrophic world wars and a world depression we are learning that our meeting can no longer be in indifference, for that leads to encounters in ignorance and prejudice, which is the tinder of hostility, and then violence. But if this violence leads to World War III, it will be the end of human history. Hence, for the sake of survival, meeting in dialogue and cooperation is the only alternative to global disaster.

The mid-twentieth century global catastrophic events also had a profound impact on the Christian churches. Stanley Samartha, the first Director of the World Council of Churches’ division on interreligious dialogue, notes that, “It is not without significance that only after the second world war (1945), when, with the dismantling of colonialism, new nations emerged on the stage of history and asserted their identity through their own religions and cultures, that both the Vatican and World Council of Churches began to articulate a more positive attitude toward the peoples of other religious traditions.”¹

Paralleling the rise of these extraordinary “external” factors was the rise of “internal” ones, which might be described succinctly as the even more dramatic shift in the under­standing of the structure of reality and especially the understanding of truth that has taken place in Western civilization, and even beyond, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This shift has made dialogue not only possible but also necessary. Where such words as immutability, simplicity and monologue had largely characterized our Western understanding of reality in an earlier day, in the past 150 years mutuality, relationality and dialogue have come to be understood as constitutive elements of the very structure of our human reality. This substantive shift has been both very penetrating and broad, profoundly affecting both our understanding of what it means to be human and our systematic reflection on that meaning-in traditional Christian terms, our “theologizing.” It is important, therefore, to examine this enormous sea change in our understanding of reality and truth, this fundamental paradigm shift-and the implications it has for our systematic reflection.

 a. Metaphysics: From Statics to Dynamics

In the philosophical world inherited by the West, Greek philosophy was dominant, and by the Middle Ages the “substantive” thinking of Aristotle, transmitted mainly through the writings of Thomas Aquinas, came to predominate. The universe was thought of in terms of substance and accident. This very structure of reality tended toward a static view of things. All reality was said to be made up of combinations of substances and accidents. Substances could not be perceived. For example, there exists the substance of a particular chair in which such varied accidents as its size, shape, color, and hardness inhere. The accidents can change, can go out of and come into existence, as the chair is painted, reupholstered, and the like, but the substance will persist as the underlying reality within which the various accidents come and go. This philosophical structure clearly tends toward the static.²

In the post-Enlightenment period of the past two hundred years the dominant Western understanding of reality has moved from static to dynamic, from a center-and-periphery dependence of the passing accidents on the persisting substance to a pluralistically mutual and relational conception. Even the relationships of the internal elements of a being within itself, and their relationship to the various elements of its context are now seen as part of the being itself. Nothing exists in isolation; the relationship of things to one another is essential to both. In theoretical physics Einstein taught us the relativity of the whole cosmos, and in nuclear physics we learned that our very physical reality is so dependent upon the most exquisite interplay of sub-atomic elements like forces, anti-forces, electrons, protons, neutrons and quarks, that if one or another element were to be modified or eliminated our whole material reality would radically change or perhaps even disappear into the equivalent of an astronomical “dark hole.”  Though not all critical Western thinkers conceive of reality as process-many do, of course-they do, however, think of it at least as being constituted in mutuality, relationality.

b. Epistemology: Deabsolutizing Truth

From a certain perspective, how we conceive the ultimate structure of the universe-as either static or dynamic, for example-is the most fundamental dimension of our human thought. Everything else is built upon and stems from it. Even those who claim to have no ultimate view of the universe, no metaphysics, do in fact have the most elusive kind of metaphysics, a covert one.

However, from another perspective, that of origin and development, it is how we understand our process of understanding and what meaning and status we attribute to our statements about reality-in other words, our epistemology-which is primary. It will profoundly determine how we conceive our view of the ultimate structure of reality, our metaphysics, what value we place on it and how we can use it. The same is true of everything else we perceive, conceive, and think of, and how we sub­sequently decide on things and act. For this reasons, the revolutionary changes in our understanding of our understanding, in our understanding of truth, that is, in our episte­mology, that have occurred in the West since the Enlightenment have been extremely pervasive and radically influential. They must, therefore, be examined in greater detail.

Whereas our Western notion of truth was largely absolute, static, and monologic or exclusive up to the past century, it has since become deabsolutized, dynamic and dialogic-in a word, “relational.” (Already two millennia and more ago some Hindu and Buddhist thinkers held a non-absolutistic epistemology, but that fact had no significant impact on the West; because of the cultural eclipse of those civilizations in the modern period and the dominance of the Western scientific worldview, these ancient non-absolutistic epistemologies have until now played no signifi­cant role in the emerging global society-though in the context of dialogue, they should in the future.)³ This “new” view of truth came about in at least six different, but closely related, ways. In brief they are:

   1.

Historicism: truth is deabsolutized by the perception that reality is always described in terms of the circumstances of the time it is expressed.

  2.

Intentionality: Seeking the truth with the intention of acting accordingly deabsolutizes the statement.

  3.

Sociology of knowledge: truth is deabsolutized in terms of geography, culture, and social standing.

  4.

Limits of language: truth as the meaning of something and especially as talk about the transcendent is deabsolutized by the nature of human language.

  5.

Hermeneutics: all truth, all knowledge is seen as interpreted truth, knowledge, and hence is deabsolutized by the observer who is always also interpreter.

  6.

Dialogue: The knower engages reality in a dialogue in a language the knower provides, thereby deabsolutizing all statements about reality.

In short, our understanding of truth and reality has been under­going a radical shift. This new paradigm which is being born understands all statements about reality, especially about the meaning of things, to be historical, intentional, perspectival, partial, interpretive and dialogic. What is common to all these qualities is the notion of relationality, that is, that all expressions or understandings of reality are in some fundamental way related to the speaker or knower. It is while bearing this paradigm shift in mind that we must now proceed with our analysis.

0. Before the nineteenth century in Europe truth, that is, a statement about reality, was conceived in quite an absolute, static, exclusivistic either-or manner. If something was true at one time, it was always true; not only empirical facts but also the meaning of things or the oughtness that was said to flow from them were thought of in this way. For example, if it was true for the Pauline writer to say in the first century that women should keep silence in the church, then it was always true that women should keep silence in the church; or if it was true for Pope Boniface VIII to state in 1302, “we declare, state, and define that it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of all human beings that they submit to the Roman Pontiff,”⁴ then it was always true that they need do so. At bottom, the notion of truth was based exclusively on the Aristotelian principle of contradiction: a thing could not be true and not true in the same way at the same time. Truth was defined by way of exclusion; A was A because it could be shown not to be not-A. Truth was thus understood to be absolute, static, exclusivistically either-or. This is a classicist or absolutist view of truth.

1. Historicism: In the nineteenth century many scholars came to perceive all state­ments about the truth of the meaning of something as partially the products of their historical circumstances. Those concrete circumstances helped determine the fact that the statement under study was even called forth, that it was couched in particular intellectual categories (for example, abstract Platonic, or concrete legal, language), particular literary forms (for example, mythic or metaphysical language), and par­ticular psychological settings (such as a polemic response to a specific attack). These scholars argued that only if the truth statements were placed in their historical situation, their historical Sitz im Leben, could they be properly understood. The understanding of the text could be found only in context. To express that same original meaning in a later Sitz im Leben one would require a proportionately different state­ment. Thus, all statements about the meaning of things were now seen to be deabsolutized in terms of time.

This is a historical view of truth. Clearly at its heart is a notion of relationality: any statement about the truth of the meaning of something has to be understood in relation­ship to its historical context.

2. Intentionality: Later thinkers like Max Scheler added a corollary to this historicizing of knowledge; it concerned not the past but the future. Such scholars also saw truth as having an element of intentionality at its base, as being oriented ultimately toward action, praxis. They argued that we perceive certain things as questions to be answered and set goals to pursue specific knowledge because we wish to do something about those matters; we intend to live according to the truth and meaning that we hope to discern in the answers to the questions we pose, in the knowledge we decide to seek. The truth of the meaning of things was thus seen as deabsolutized by the action-oriented inten­tionality of the thinker-speaker.

This is an intentional or praxis view of truth, and it too is basically relational: a statement has to be understood in relationship to the action- oriented intention of the speaker.

3. The sociology of knowledge: Just as statements of truth about the meaning of things were seen by some thinkers to be historically deabsolutized in time, so too, starting in this century with scholars like Karl Mannheim, such statements began to be seen as deabsolutized by such things as the culture, class and gender of the thinker-speaker, regardless of time. All reality was said to be perceived from the perspective of the perceiver’s own world view. Any statement of the truth of the meaning of something was seen to be perspectival, “standpoint-bound,” standortgebunden, as Karl Mannheim put it, and thus deabsolutized.

This is a perspectival view of truth and is likewise relational: all statements are fundamentally related to the standpoint of the speaker.

4. The limitations of language: Following Ludwig Wittgenstein and others, many thinkers have come to see that any statement about the truth of things can be at most only a partial description of the reality it is trying to describe. Although reality can be seen from an almost limitless number of perspectives, human language can express things from only one, or perhaps a very few, perspectives at one. If this is now seen to be true of what we call “scientific truths,” it is so much the more true of statements about the truth of the meaning of things. The very fact of dealing with the truth of the “meaning” of something indi­cates that the knower is essentially involved and hence reflects the perspectival character of all such statements. A statement may be true, of course-it may accurately describe the extra-mental reality it refers to-but it will always be cast in particular categories, language, con­cerns, etc., of a particular “standpoint,” and in that sense will be limited, deabsolutized.

This also is a perspectival view of truth, and therefore also relational.

This limited and limiting, as well as liberating, quality of language is especially clear in talk of the transcendent. The transcen­dent is by definition that which goes beyond our experience. Any state­ments about the transcendent must thus be deabsolutized and limited far beyond the perspectival character seen in ordinary statements.

5. Hermeneutics: Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Riceour recently led the way in developing the science of hermeneutics, which, by arguing that all knowledge of a text is at the same time an interpretation of the text, further deabsolutizes claims about the “true” meaning of the text. But this basic insight goes beyond knowledge of texts and applies to all knowledge.

Some of the key notions here can be compressed in the following mantra (a mantra is a seven-syllable phrase which capsulizes an insight): “Subject, object, two is one.” The whole of hermeneutics is here in nuce: All knowledge is interpreted knowledge; the perceiver is part of the perceived; the subject is part of the object. When the object of study is some aspect of humanity the obvious fact that the observer is also the observed “deobjectivizes,” deabsolutizes, the resultant knowledge, truth. But the same thing is also fundamentally true of all knowledge, of all truth, even of the natural sciences, for the various aspects of nature are observed only through the categories we ourselves provide, within the horizons we establish, under the paradigms we utilize, in response to the questions we raise, and in relationship to the connections we make-a further deabsolutizing of truth, even of the “hard” sciences.

“Subject, object, two is one.” Knowledge comes from the subject perceiving the object, but since the subject is also part of its object, as described above the two are in that sense one. In knowing also the object in some form is taken up into the subject, and thus again the two are one. And yet, there is also a radical twoness there, for it is the very process of the two becoming one-or the two being perceived as one, or, even better, the becoming aware that the two, which are very really two, are also in fact on another level very really one-that we call knowing.

This is an interpretive view of truth. It is clear that relationality pervades this hermeneutical, interpretative, view of truth. (It is interesting to note that one dimension of this interpretive understanding of truth can already be found in St. Thomas Aquinas, who states that “things known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower-cognita sunt in cognoscente secundum modum cognoscentis.”⁵)

6. Dialogue: A further development of this basic insight is that I learn not by being merely passively open or receptive to, but by being in dialogue with, extra-­mental reality. I not only “hear” or receive reality, but I also-and, I think, first of all-“speak” to reality. I ask it questions, I stimulate it to speak back to me, to answer my questions. In the pro­cess I give reality the specific categories and language in which to respond to me. The “answers” that I receive back from reality will always be in the language, the thought categories, of the questions I put to it. It can “speak” to me, can really communicate with my mind, only in a language and categories that I understand.

When the speaking, the responding, grows less and less understandable to me, if the answers I receive are sometimes confused and unsatis­fying, then I probably need to learn to speak a more appropriate language when I put questions to reality. If, for example, I ask the question, “How far is yellow?” of course I will receive an non-sense answer. Or if I ask questions about living things in mechanical categories, I will receive confusing and unsatisfying answers. Thus, I will receive con­fusing and unsatisfying answers to questions about human sexuality if I use categories that are solely physical-biological; witness the absur­dity of the answer that birth control is forbidden by the natural law-the question falsely assumes that the nature of humanity is merely physical-biological.

This is a dialogic view of truth, whose very name reflects its relationality.

With this new and irreversible understanding of the meaning of truth, the critical thinker has undergone a radical Copernican turn. Just as the vigorously resisted shift in astronomy from geocentrism to heliocentrism revolutionized that science, the paradigm or model shift in the under- standing of truth statements has revolutionized all the humanities, including theology-ideology. The macro-paradigm or macro-model with which critical thinkers operate today (or the “horizon” within which they operate, to use Bernard Lonergan’s term) is charac­terized by historical, social, linguistic, hermeneutical, praxis and dialogic-relational-consciousness. This paradigm or model shift is far advanced among thinkers and doers; but as in the case of Copernicus, and even more dramatically of Galileo, there are still many resisters in positions of great institutional power.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the role in the “understanding of reality and how to live accordingly” played by the conceptual paradigm or model one has of reality. The paradigm or model within which we perceive reality not only profoundly affects our theoretical understanding of reality, but also has immense practical conse­quences. For example, in Western medicine the body is usually conceived of as a highly nuanced, living machine, and therefore if one part wears out, the obvious thing to do is to replace the worn part-hence, organ transplants originated in Western, but not in Oriental, medicine.

However, in Oriental, Chinese, medicine, the body is conceived of as a finely balanced harmony: “pressure” exerted on one part of the body is assumed to have an opposite effect in some other part of the body-hence, acupuncture originated in Oriental, but not in Western, medicine.⁶

Furthermore, obviously some particular paradigms or models for perceiving reality will fit the data better than others, and they will then be preferred-e.g., the shift from the geocentric to the heliocentric model in astronomy. But sometimes differing models will each in their own ways “fit” the data more or less adequately, as in the example of Western and Oriental medicines. The differing models are then viewed as complementary. Clearly it would be foolish to limit one’s perception of reality to only one of the complementary paradigms or models. Perhaps at times a more comprehensive model, a mega-model, can be conceived to subsume two or more complementary models, but surely it will never be possible to perceive reality except through paradigms or models; hence meta-model thinking is not possible, except in the more limited sense of meta-mono-model thinking, that is, perceiving reality through multiple, differing models which cannot be subsumed under one mega-model, but must stand in creative, polar tension in relationship to each other. Such might be called multi-model thinking. This pattern in fact has been characteristic of physics for decades as it uses both particle and wave descriptions of subatomic matter.

With the deabsolutized view of the truth of the meaning of things we come face to face with the specter of relativism, the opposite pole of absolutism. Unlike relationality, a neutral term which merely denotes the quality of being in relationship, relativism, like so many “isms,” is a basically negative term. If it can no longer be claimed that any statement of the truth of the meaning of things is absolute, totally objective, because the claim does not square with our experience of reality, it is equally impossible to claim that every statement of the truth of the meaning of things is completely relative, totally sub­jective, for that also does not square with our experience of reality, and of course would logically lead to an atomizing isolation which would stop all discourse, all statements to others.

Our perception, and hence description, of reality is like our view of an object in the center of a circle of viewers. My view and descrip­tion of the object, or reality, will be true, but it will not include what someone on the other side of the circle perceives and describes, which will also be true. So, neither of our perceptions and descriptions of reality is total, complete-“absolute” in that sense-or “objective” in the sense of not in any way being dependent on a “subject” or viewer. At the same time, however, it is also obvious that there is an “objective,” doubtless “true” aspect to each perception and description, even though each is relational to the perceiver-“subject.”

At the same time that the always partial, perspectival, deabsolu­tized view of all truth statements is recognized, the common human basis for perceptions/descriptions of reality and values must also be kept in mind. All human beings experience certain things in common. We all experience our bodies, pain, pleasure, hunger, satiation. Our cognitive faculties perceive such structures in reality as variation and sym­metries in pitch, color and form. All humans experience affection and dislike. Here, and in other commonalities, we find the bases for building a universal, fundamental epistemology, aesthetics, value system. Although it will be vital to distinguish carefully between those human experiences/perceptions which come from nature and those which come from nurture, it will at times, however, be difficult to discern precisely where the distinction lies. In fact, all of our “natural” experiences are more or less shaped by our “nurturing” because all of our experience and knowl­edge are interpreted through the lens of our “nurturing” struc­tures.

But if we can no longer hold to an absolutist view of the truth of he meaning of things, we must take certain steps so as not to be logi­cally forced into the silence of total relativism. First, besides striving to be as accurate and fair as possible in gathering and assessing information and submitting it to the critiques of our peers and other thinkers and scholars, we need also to dredge out, state clearly, and analyze our own pre-suppositions-a constant, ongoing task. Even in this of course we will be operating from a particular “standpoint.”  

Therefore, we need, secondly, to complement our constantly critiqued statements with statements from different “standpoints.”  That is, we need to engage in dialogue with those who have differing cultural, philosophical, social, religious viewpoints so as to strive toward an ever fuller perception of the truth of the meaning of things. If we do not engage in such dialogue we will not only be trapped within the perspective of our own “standpoint,” but will now also be aware of our lack. We will no longer with integrity be able to remain deliberately turned in on ourselves. Our search for the truth of the meaning of things makes it a necessity for us as human beings to engage in dialogue. Knowingly to refuse dialogue today could be an act of fundamental human irresponsibility-in Judeo-Christian terms, a sin.

Paul Knitter noted much the same thing concerning the shift from the former exclusivistically either-or model of truth to the dialogic or relational model: “In the new model, truth will no longer be identified by its ability to exclude or absorb others. Rather, what is true will reveal itself mainly by its ability to relate to other expressions of truth and to grow through these relationships: truth defined not by exclusion but by relation. The new model reflects what our pluralistic world is dis­covering: no truth can stand alone; no truth can be totally unchange­able. Truth, by its very nature, needs other truth. If it cannot relate, its quality of truth must be open to question.”⁷

c. Psychology: Developmental and Relational

Because the sharpening focus on mutuality, relationality and dialogue in the science of the human psyche has provided another founda­tion stone for interreligious, interideological dialogue, it is important to reflect a little here on what we have learned in recent decades about the structure and growth of the human self, particularly through the work of developmental and relational psychology. The pioneers of the former were Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson; one of the seminal thinkers of the latter is Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy. Piaget’s and Erikson’s work was applied to the area of the development of the moral self and the believing self especially by Lawrence Kohlberg and James Fowler. Key philosophical and theological thinkers in this field include Bernard Lonergan and H. Richard Niebuhr.

The reality of mutuality, of relationality, of dialogue, is at the very foundation of our human self. The self does not come into existence full blown at birth. None of us mere mortals were born like the goddess Athena, full grown from the forehead of Zeus. We are all born from our mothers’ wombs as tiny animals with the potential of developing into conscious selves. If left to ourselves we would soon physically perish. If simply fed automatically-say intravenously-without human contact, we would not physically perish, but we would also never become human.

In the beginning there is no distinction between “me and what is not me”; there is just a continuum of various sensations, good and bad. Only gradually does the new potential human being learn to distinguish between its own body and the world around it. This we all know simply from observing the growth of our own infants. But what is not so imme­diately obvious, but nevertheless equally true, is that the human, conscious selves of children come into existence and develop only in relationship to other selves. H. Richard Niebuhr put the matter suc­cinctly when he wrote: “To be a self in the presence of other selves is not a derivative experience but primordial. To be able to say that I am I is not an inference from the statement that I think thoughts [here Niebuhr is obviously rejecting Descartes’ cogito, ergo sum] nor from the state­ment that I have a law-acknowledging conscience [here he is rejecting Kant’s starting points of the starry skies above and the inner law of conscience]. It is, rather, the acknowledgment of my existence as the counterpart of another self.”⁸

Just how fundamental mutuality, relationality and dialogue are to developing human beings is illustrated very clearly by some comments of James W. Fowler. Fowler divides human faith development into six stages plus what he calls a pre-stage, infancy and early childhood. Speaking of the origin of the images of God being formed in this initial period, he wrote: “Particularly they are composed from our first experiences of mutuality, in which we form the rudimentary awareness of self as separate from and dependent upon the immensely powerful others, who were present at our first consciousness and who ‘knew us.’” He then went on to say of this pre-stage of faith:

The quality of mutuality and the strength of trust, autonomy, hope and courage (or their opposites) developed in this phase underlie (or threaten to undermine) all that comes later in faith development. The emergent strength in this stage is the fund of basic trust and the relational experience of mutuality with the one(s) providing primary  love and care. The danger or deficiency in this stage is a failure of mutuality.⁹

Although it would not be appropriate here to describe and analyze the various stages of psychological development as presented by Piaget, Erikson and others, there are several points that will be helpful to note. First, as the cognitive faculties develop-as, for example, the individual learns to distinguish the self from what is not the self, to discern discrete objects, to relate them, to make formal generalizations-the capacity for affectivity, that is, the search for values, develops in parallel fashion, as does the capacity for moral judgment. Becoming more intelligent does not automatically mean a person will become pro­portionately more loving, more moral. But if the cognitive self does not develop adequately, the affective and moral self also cannot develop adequately. Kholberg summed up the point: “Cognitive maturity is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for moral judgment maturity. While formal operations [the ability to make cognitive generalizations] may be necessary for principled morality, one may be a theoretical physicist and yet not be able to make moral judgments at the principled level.”¹⁰

Thus it became apparent that although not all humans continue to grow into fully mature persons, there clearly are stages of development in both the cognitive and the affective-moral judgment areas and that the two areas are intimately related, with the cognitive, up to a point, being a prerequisite, but not automatic cause, of the affective-moral. It became further clear that as in the cognitive area the child comes to distinguish its own self from the world and other selves around it, so in the moral area the child moves from external moral direction to internal principles. According to Kohlberg, this more advanced moral stage is followed by an “orientation not only to actually ordained social rules but to principles of choice involving appeal to logical universality and consistency.”¹¹ He also notes, “the general direction of maturity of moral judgment is a direction of greater morality,”¹² of greater inclusivity: loving your neighbor means loving first those closest to you, then all your relatives, members of your “tribe,” your nation, the whole human race, all living things, all reality, and finally the Source of reality.

It is possible, of course, to have a very restricted scope of who to love and then immediately include the Source; one can love immediate friends and God but no one in between. The New Testament notes pertinently that whoever says they love God whom they cannot see, but does not love their brother/sister whom they do see is a liar-1 John 4:20. Such persons can be called liars in that their restrictive actions at least unconsciously belie the ontological, and hence moral, implications embedded in the very notion of the Source of all reality.

The motor which moves the human person through these several stages of development, cognitive and affective-moral, is the drive for self- transcendence, the desire to go beyond oneself. We are commonly aware of this by our everyday experience of always wanting to know more-why else read this book, for example?-of always wanting to do better. But of course at the very heart of the notion of self-transcendence is mutuality, rela­tionality and dialogue, for we transcend ourselves by seeking the other. Walter Conn notes that “it is clear that Erikson is telling us that one becomes one’s truly and fully human self only inso­far as, and to the extent that, one reaches out beyond oneself to others, that, in short, self-realization is self-transcendence.”¹³ Piaget makes a converse point when he writes: “Through an apparently paradoxical mechanism...it is precisely when the subject is most self-centered that he knows himself the least, and it is to the extent that he discovers himself in the universe and constructs it by virtue of that fact ...”¹⁴ that he knows himself most. If the drive toward reaching out is blocked, even the possibility to be one’s own self is blocked: The only way to self-realization is through self-transcendence, through knowing and loving the other. The Catholic philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan arrives at the same conclu­sion: “Just as it is one’s own self-transcendence that enables one to know others accurately and to judge them fairly, so inversely it is through knowledge and appreciation of others that we come to know ourselves and to fill out and refine our apprehension of values.”¹⁵

If self-realization comes through the self-transcendence of knowing and loving the other, it reaches a high point in knowing and loving another self, another person. Erikson says, “We are what we love”;¹⁶ Conn further states: “In the love of intimacy, then, self-transcendence is radically ‘personified’ insofar as the very meaning of identity is transformed to include in it the other to whom one reaches out.”¹⁷

Growth, then, is a series of inter-connected levels of development in self-realization/ self-transcendence. The critical move of self-transcendence on each level so radically alters our horizon of reality that everything within it has to be re-ordered, turned around into a new constellation. Hence it is rightly called a conversion, a turning of things around toward a new center. Lonergan speaks of an intellectual conversion as a new perception of “truth attained by cognitional self-transcendence,” not unlike the paradigm-shift change in our views of truth dis­cussed above, and of moral conversion “to values apprehended, affirmed and realized by real self-transcendence,”¹⁸ where actions are decided on the basis of internalized principles. But an even more radical and comprehensive self-transcending conversion is that of falling in love. As Lonergan notes, when one falls in love, “one’s being becomes being-in-love,” for the mere “capacity for self-transcendence [becomes] achievement when one falls in love.”¹⁹ “Such a being-in-love brings about a transformation of one’s horizon, one’s world, one’s very being, and so a transformation of the source of all one’s discoveries, deci­sions and deeds. Such being-in-love, then, is a real and basic conversion.”²⁰

(It should be parenthetically noted that with each new stage arrived at, with each conversion experienced, whether cognitively, morally or affectively, the attainments of the previous stages are not rejected, but subsumed in the new stage.)

The final conversion that Kohlberg, Fowler and Lonergan speak about is called religious conversion. This does not refer to becoming a Christian, a Muslim, a Hindu or the like, although, to be sure, Christians, Muslims and Hindus can experience the religious conversion they speak of. Rather, as Conn puts it, it is

the radical reorientation of one’s entire life that occurs when God is allowed to move from the periphery to the center of one’s being.... (which) is possible only for the person who has totally fallen in love with a mysterious, uncomprehended God, for the person who has been grasped by an other-worldly love and completely transformed into a being-in-love.... such radical transformation might be best understood as a conversion from religion to God.²¹

I agree with what Walter Conn has so perceptively stated here, especially when one bears in mind that each new stage or conversion does not mean the rejection but rather the taking up and radically intensi­fying of what was attained in the previous stages. However, we run a grave risk of confusing ourselves when we use the word “God.” For theists God tends to become a person-the source and goal of all truth and goodness, to be sure-but still the person who is this huge, unfathomable, infinite source of values. Nevertheless, I do not love another human person radically differently, radically more intensely, because I have also come to love this best person of all, God. No, the religious conversion means coming to know and love, and therefore truly to become one with, all Reality, not quantitatively, but qualitatively; that means becoming one somehow with its very Structure, its Principle. Perhaps we theists should consider-at least for a period of a healthy moratorium-not calling the Source of reality “God,” not out of reverence for the name “God,” but out of reverence for that toward which it points, lest we distort it, her, him, which we try to name. We might also come to appreciate more the nonpersonal dimension of divinity (more about that below).

The Japanese Seiichi Yagi makes a similar point:

God is not a being alongside of humans. The human being knows God when s/he loves. But the encounter with God also means that in the [Christian] word of the proclamation we perceive God. God on the one hand is the one who loves through me. On the other hand God is the one whom I encounter in the word of the proclamation. God is, then, on the one hand the deepest Subject of me, and on the other is simultaneously the Over-against (das Gegenüber) who addresses me through humans. Transcendence is, so to speak that Field of Force (Wirkungsfeld).... The human being is thus in the Field of Force of Transcendence.²²

In any case, such a religious conversion does not in any way deflect our love of human persons. I believe that through it we come to love each person more intensely, physically and emotionally as well as spiri­tually. (Persons less advanced in virtue, (w)holiness, often have to love unlikable persons by an act of the will without the support of the emotions. Holy persons-saints, arahats, bodhisattvas, etc.-are those who see the lovableness in every person, and therefore respond with emo­tional support in love.)  In a fundamental way concern for the good of persons-conscious, loving selves-cannot be surpassed, only expanded. Doubtless that is why Jesus, standing in the heart of the Jewish tradi­tion, quoted from it, urging us not only to follow the commandment that we should love God with all our heart, but “like unto it” (homoia aute--Mt. 22:39), we should love our neighbor. Jesus, and the best of the world’s religious wisdom, perceived that we come to the full love of all reality and its Source and Goal through the love of human persons-and we never leave the love of them behind if we would be fully human, truly religious-authentically Christian.

A similar point is touchingly made in an Italian folk song about Francis of Assisi who is in love with nature and human beings:

One day Francis crying said to Jesus:

“I love the sun, I love the stars,

I love Clara and the Sisters,

I love human hearts,

I love all the beautiful things.

Oh my Lord, I must excuse myself,

For I should love you alone.”

Smiling, the Lord responded to him thus:

“I love the sun, I love the stars,

I love Clara and the Sisters,

I love human hearts,

I love all the beautiful things.

Oh my Francis, cry no more,

For I love what you love.”²³

As a link between this section and the next let us recall the last half of the second greatest commandment of Judaism and Christianity: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” We cannot love our neighbor except, and to the degree, that we love ourselves. This is the moral acme of mutuality.

d. Ethics: A Focus on Mutuality, Relationality and Dialogue

Since a religion or ideology is an “explanation of the meaning of life and how to live accordingly” it is important that we look at least ever so briefly at the penetration of the notions of mutuality, rela­tionality and dialogue into the field of ethics. To do this we will follow the route of the discipline of relational psychology. Relational psychology sees human development taking place within a context of many relationships, which by their very nature are always mutual. There is no such thing as a one-way relationship. You cannot always give and never receive, nor can you always receive and never give, without the relationship becoming gravely distorted and destructive. Margaret Cotroneo, a Catholic theologian and practicing family therapist (and in this, a colleague of Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy), believes that it is inherent in the structure of things to demand a balance of give and take in all sustained relationships. “This notion of an intrinsic order of justice is the ontological ground of relation­ship. It begins with the fact that we are born in need of care and nurture. Whether or not we were given what we rightly deserved helps to shape our ethical stance toward relationships.”